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Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela Reviews

The story of young swami and his first crush. And when they get to the fat guy.... whoa. How can anyone top that? Oh... It's quite a sideshow. The same two samples being used repeatedly is simply ridiculous. Didn't even mention that it only occurs every 144 years.

This is a documentary about Kumbh mela - the largest religious festival on Earth, with 70 million people meeting at the Ganges and Yumuna rivers in India every 12 years. This movie was filmed at the Kumbh mela in 2001, and they did quite a good job of getting around the event, meeting a lot of gurus, sahdus and other interesting characters. I didn't know anything about it before i saw the film, but I thought it did a good job of capturing some of the flavour of the experience in an impartial way.

:fresh: A remarkable effort to give the world a look into an extraordinary yet little known religious festival in India that brings fifty million pilgrims together in thousands of camps on the banks of the Ganges every twelve years in a spirit of peace, love, and harmony. This is a spontaneous unscripted documentary, planned and executed in just a few weeks by two dedicated and talented film makers. The characters are all real. The film does a wonderful job of capturing the diversity of this gathering from the tawdry to the sublime, without being judgmental. A great soundtrack and well chosen camera effects help the audience share the essence of the place and the intensity of the collective trance. It wisely refrains from trying to explain what cannot be explained.

[font=Arial][size=2]"Kumbh Mela: Short Cut to Nirvana" is a beautifully crafted documentary that details the organized chaos and curious piety surrounding the Kumbh Mela, an Indian religious festival held on 12-year intervals for the past two millennia. The most recent festival attracted an estimated 70 million people.

Filmmakers Maurizio Benazzo and Nick Day do a wonderful job in capturing the color, commotion and cacophony of the Kumbh Mela, which seems to put more emphasis on razzle-dazzle than religion. The festival is overpopulated with swamis, yogis and gurus who offer opaque words of wisdom designed to help steer the faithful to a more serene life and afterlife. Yet the Kumbh Mela often seems more like a circus: evening theatrical events present religious dramas with some damn hammy actors going to town in what are supposed to be plays of faith, special kiosks are set up to enable the attendees to stay connected to the Internet, and special kitchens are engineered to prepare heaping gobs of what looks to be some of the least appetizing food ever put on a plate.

The film benefits from having Swami Krishnanand, a young articulate and photogenic Indian mystic, as its quasi-narrator who tries to make sense of what is going on. The swami gets to show the camera much of the festival and even shows off a lot of himself in an extended sequence where he strips to a loincloth and bathes in the Ganges River.

"Kumbh Mela: Short Cut to Nirvana" is a handsomely photographed, beautifully edited, and constantly absorbing glimpse into a unique corner of the human experience. Western audiences may not understand everything they see in this film, but the film nonetheless makes for absorbing viewing and is highly recommended for anyone in search of a different answer to universal questions of faith and hope.